History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.
– from The Anthropocene Reviewed book by John Green
By the time you’re my age …
By the time you’re my age, you’ll realize that everything you once thought mattered so much turns out to mean very little.
– from The Three-Body Problem book by Cixin Liu
A society cannot run as it …
A society cannot run as it should unless people with excellent legal minds make it their business to make it run.
– from A Little Life book by Hanya Yanagihara
Something like 90 percent of humans …
Something like 90 percent of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, and the only one we routinely give to children (commonly in the form of soda). Few of us even think of it as a drug, much less our daily use of it as an addiction. It’s so pervasive that it’s easy to overlook the fact that to be caffeinated is not baseline consciousness but, in fact, an altered state. It just happens to be a state that virtually all of us share, rendering it invisible.
– from This Is Your Mind on Plants book by Michael Pollan
The fundamental scam of modernity is …
The fundamental scam of modernity is the idea that government needs to manage the money supply. It is an unquestioned starting assumption of all mainstream economic schools of thought and political parties. There isn’t a shred of real‐world evidence to support this contention, and every attempt to manage the money supply has ended with economic disaster. Money supply management is the problem masquerading as its solution; the triumph of emotional hope over hard‐headed reason; the root of all political free lunches sold to gullible voters. It functions like a highly addictive and destructive drug, such as crystal meth or sugar: it causes a beautiful high at the beginning, fooling its victims into feeling invincible, but as soon as the effect subsides, the come‐down is devastating and has the victim begging for more. This is when the hard choice needs to be made: either suffer the withdrawal effects of ceasing the addiction, or take another hit, delay the reckoning by a day, and sustain severe long‐term damage.
– from The Bitcoin Standard book by Saifedean Ammous
Those who deal in magic learn …
Those who deal in magic learn to see the world in a slightly different light than everyone else. You gain a perspective you had never considered before, a way of thinking that would just never have occurred to you without exposure to the things a wizard sees and hears.
– from Storm Front book by Jim Butcher
The point of a child is …
The point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all – and, more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him.
– from A Little Life book by Hanya Yanagihara
When powerful countries have disputes, they …
When powerful countries have disputes, they don’t get their lawyers to plead their cases to judges. Instead, they threaten each other and either reach agreements or fight. The international order follows the law of the jungle much more than it follows international law.
– from Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order book by Ray Dalio
You should never feel like the …
You should never feel like the world owes you anything. It doesn’t. There is no version of hustling harder or smarter that involves relying on the assumption that someone is going to do anything for you. You must accept that it’s all on you.
– from Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter book by Curtis Jackson
The older I get the more …
The older I get the more I hold each day precious. I’ve become steadily more relentless in purging from my life things, activities and people who no longer add value while seeking out and adding those that do.
– from The Simple Path to Wealth book by J. L. Collins